I can remember being at a conference back in 2005, where a fellow attendee from the Export Development Corporation of Canada took one look at the Sony Ericcson touch phone I was carrying and said “you’re Canadian: you should be using a Blackberry”.
The evolutionary biologist and crusading atheist Richard Dawkins is not as singular as the mass media makes him appear. To anyone familiar with the intellectual history of modern England, he is just the latest example from a long tradition, stretching back to Victorians like T. H. Huxley and W. K. Clifford, of what might be called establishment dissenters or godless Calvinists. Dawkins is a near-reincarnation of John Burden Sanderson ('J. B. S.') Haldane (1892-1964). The Selfish Gene, the book that first brought wide fame to Dawkins, is largely an extension of earlier scientific work done by Haldane. Both men are Wykehamists, products of New College, Oxford, actually one of Oxford's oldest, which has a record of producing notable graduates in everything from mathematics (Freeman Dyson) to politics (Richard Crossman, Oswald Mosley), and as these examples also show, a fondness for iconoclastic contrarianism.
The province-wide polls didn’t see it coming. Social media was filled with glee at the thought of the end of the BC Liberal government. Yet, on election night, the stunning results were in: Christy Clark, the Jersey girl of BC politics, had not only led her BC Liberals back into government for a fourth term, but she’d increased their majority doing so.
As Christy Clark scrambled to prepare an unexpected victory speech Tuesday night, it became exceedingly clear that poll numbers deserve more scrutiny. The BC Premier was considered the underdog in the May 14 provincial election, trailing NDP leader Adrian Dix by a heavy margin during much of the race. Polling in the last few days kept Dix ahead of Clark by nearly 9%, with some pollster claiming the probability of Dix winning was 98%.
The looming LCBO strike threat has suddenly gotten all sorts of Ontarians anxious about a potentially dry next few days (or weeks). LCBO workers, who are represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), voted 95% in favour of striking, and the deadline is approaching in less than twenty-four hours.
Did you vote Conservative in the last three elections since 2006? Did you vote this way because you were sick and tired of the endless corruption in government, all of which cost you, the taxpayer, dearly?
The fifth screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 magnum opus The Great Gatsby didn’t stray too far from the original plot of the classic American novel. This was both the movie’s greatest flaw and asset.
The name Marie-Héléne Tokar, resident of the small Laurentian town of St. Hippolyte, Quebec probably means nothing to you. But to those of us who follow stories of pit bull atrocities, the name fairly leaps from the page.